


East of the Sun, West of the Moon

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anchor Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Character Death, Lonely!Martin, M/M, Orpheus and Eurydice, Persephone and Hades, The Extinction, also this is not how you handly radiation contamination kids, and also the Bhagavad Gita, background Daisy/Basira, cupid and psyche, featuring background Jonah!Elias, gratuitous allusions to Ovid, it is not this easy to break into dangerous industrial sites, radiation poisoning, spoilers thru 145, wild speculation re: Watcher's Crown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 12:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19946170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: The world is always ending.Or: Jon had already lost friends, loved ones, himself. What else could the Isolation take? What could it do to him that he hadn't already endured?(Or: Martin saves the world, and Jon saves Martin.)





	East of the Sun, West of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> I said on Twitter that I wanted to see the Web bind Jon and Martin, but we will probably get Peter binding Martin to the Extinction. [eyemoji](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyemoji/pseuds/eyemoji) said "Both?" and I thought of this.

After everything else he'd been through, Jon underestimated the Lonely. 

Martin's farewell letter had been succinct. _I loved you. Don't follow._ But meaning had oozed out between the words, knowledge had seeped into Jon's mind: the ritual that Peter Lukas and Simon Fairchild had engineered, and all the fear and grief and resignation Martin had chosen not to voice. 

Jon had already lost friends, loved ones, himself. What else could the Isolation take? What could it do to him that he hadn't already endured?

(He had climbed out of the Forever Deep and looked into the Dark Sun. What else dared get in his way?)

He hired a car, leaving Basira in London to finish her own grieving, and drove six hours to Sellafield in one go. The nuclear facilities had officially been decommissioned years ago, though the site still held storage pools full of sludge and debris that would remain toxic for a hundred thousand years. Jon approached on foot, skin prickling when he noticed the gates standing open and unguarded in the middle of the day. 

Martin's letter burned in his pocket, though, and he'd left his rib in the glove box of the car. Anchors enough, he reasoned, to find his way through. 

The facility was silent as he wandered between the buildings. His mind's eye was — not blanked, not a hole like in Ny-Alesund, but out of focus, cloudy. He could sense Martin's presence, but only diffusely; proximity, but not direction. The further he roamed, the harder it was to even get a fix on that. Daisy would've chided him about proper detective work (Daisy, who had died rather than take up the Hunt again) but every building looked the same to Jon, and the massive spherical structure that used to house a reactor always seemed to be just over the next rooftop. He thought about going back for the car, to cover more ground—

And realized he didn't know where the car was. 

It froze him in his tracks like an icicle down his spine. He remembered parking it, he _knew_ he had parked it, and some part of him could still sense the rib like an ache in his flank. But it was diffused, indistinct, more proximity than direction, and when he tried to concentrate and Know it he met a void of information that knocked him to his knees.

He looked around the cramped alleys of Sellafield, buildings swaddled in pipes and ducts and scaffolds like metallic ivy, and realized he had no idea which way he'd come. 

He realized there was one last thing for the Lonely to take. 

Jon scrambled to his feet and started running.

By the time he'd exhausted himself, he couldn't even remember how he'd got to this place, or what it was called. He tried chanting names between gasping breaths — _Georgie Martin Tim Sasha Melanie Basira Daisy Helen —_ but the syllables turned to mush in his mouth, like a tongue twister in a foreign language. He couldn't even remember what they meant. _Martimsashirahelenie —_

Something tugged at him, a vague sense of urgency without focus or direction, but he didn't remember why he was here. Wherever the hell _here_ even was. He didn't remember why he'd ever thought he could leave. Then again, he didn't remember why he'd bother. 

Jon Sims staggered to a stop, and was forsaken.

* * *

The fog lifted eventually, of course. The deed was done. 

Jon found the letter in his pocket, read words he couldn't comprehend. And yet— _I loved you._ Even if he couldn't recall who, or when, or why. _I loved you._ Someone once had. 

When he remembered the name _Martin_ he climbed stiffly to his feet, following intuition in place of concrete knowledge. It took him to a building much like the rest of the buildings, the number stenciled on the door meaningless without his god to feed him. But he remembered gods, now, _Eye_ and _Extinction_ and _Lonely,_ and systematically circling the perimeter lead him to an unlocked door.

The air inside was humid and foul. A wide pool of stagnant water dominated the space, opaque where it wasn't scummed over with algae. Around its edge, rusted steel I-beams had been twisted into pylons and strung with razor wire and coaxial cables. They were decorated with all manner of grim baubles: test tubes and petri dishes, circuit boards and shell casings, bottles of petrol and pesticides and a _lot_ of ashes. The dead animals, he assumed, had been the last of their species, and the human bones victims of genocides, though he was still too deep in the Lonely to fully Know the awful details. 

No better invitation for the Extinction. A monument to every kind of violence humans do themselves, constructed around a pit of radioactive filth. The only thing missing was the people — or things — that had constructed it, and the one he'd come to find. 

Jon paced the perimeter of the ritual circle until he found a large enough gap in the wires to step through. He knew he probably shouldn't. The Lonely had wounded him, and he didn't need preternatural knowledge of the World-Without-Us to know tampering with a ritual circle of such power was a terrible idea. Just the statement of Jason North after he'd disrupted a similar one. 

But he hadn't come this far to leave empty-handed. And he hadn't become the Archivist because of his self-preservation instincts. Jon ducked through the gap—

— through —

— into —

_Fuck._

The air within the circle was hot, stagnant, with a spicy-sweet odor that burned his eyes and nose. A high-pitched whine originated from somewhere, studded with intermittent clicks and squawks, just loud enough to hear. But these were faint distractions compared to the feeling that settled on his shoulders and tightened his chest: the sickening certainty that something was coming, or perhaps was already here, just out of reach or just out of sight, and it was already too late to run. 

Jon tried to breathe through the fear, and coughed on the poisoned air. He searched for something to lean on, but there was only razor wire and bones. He called on the Eye and tried to See his way through it, to Know the world was spinning blithely on, but somehow he could only see oil spills and armies and a cloud of algorithms that were supplanting human judgment. 

He touched the letter in his pocket, the thing that had driven him here and guided him this far. When he opened his eyes, he saw Martin.

He lay on his side on the ground at the edge of the pool, and his clothes were soaking wet. Jon crouched at his side and felt for a pulse; it was strong and fast, though his skin was ice cold. Though his posture looked limp from a distance, Jon could feel every muscle clenched and trembling. The water in his clothes must've come from the pool, but the wet tracks on his face were definitely tears. 

"Martin," Jon said, though it sounded odd, too fast and too slow at once. "Martin, what's happening?"

Martin inhaled through gritted teeth. "Told you not to follow," he ground out.

"Yes, well, I'm an idiot," Jon snapped. "What did you do?"

Martin opened his eyes. They had always been blue, Jon remembered that, but now there was something glacial about them. Even shivering in pain, there was a stillness around him, a silence that overpowered the mechanical sounds of the circle. 

_I loved you,_ he had written, and Jon realized the real reason for the past tense. 

"I stopped it," Martin said, and his breath actually condensed briefly in the muggy air. "Peter worked it out. Or maybe it was the spiders all along, I don't know." 

"You're the anchor," Jon murmured, though it made him want to cry. "Not to an avatar, to the Extinction itself. It can't manifest except through you." _And you're already taken._

Martin nodded minutely, and squeezed his eyes shut again. "Christ, it hurts." 

Of course it did. The love of one god was agonizing enough; the rage of another at the same time must be killing him. An infinity of dooms trapped inside him, and his only defense was to hold himself apart. From everything. Forever. 

A white-hot ember kindled in Jon's chest, burning away horror and grief. He was sick up to his _teeth_ with sacrifices.

He tugged at Martin's arm. "Come on. We can't stay here."

"Then leave," Martin murmured blankly.

" _You_ can't stay," he snapped. "Unless you want to see whether the chlorine gas or the radiation is the first to reduced you to a screaming skeleton?"

Martin hissed something Jon chose not to understand, and wrapped his cold, wet arm around Jon's neck. 

Just getting him upright was difficult enough; getting him through the circle without unleashing all its trapped potential was an agonizing series of tiny steps and shifts and coaxing his shaking limbs to move. But once they were out, the burden of doom left Jon's shoulders, and he was able to think clearly, to Know his next steps. 

"I have a car," he told Martin, easing him to the ground. "It'll be faster to bring it round than to drag you to it."

Martin snorted, wrapping his arms around his knees. "Don't think you can clear radioactive contamination out at a car wash, Jon."

He fought down the urge to snap back. "Just … just be here when I get back," he asked instead, and didn't leave until Martin had agreed. 

* * *

It was a long, tense drive, and Martin vanished in the middle of it.

The strange temporal distortions hadn't ended in the ritual circle: some moments seemed to slow and stretch, cars and clouds moving with a heavy inevitability, and others seemed to accelerate until Jon could barely keep up. It got better as they put more distance between them and Sellafield, but Jon suspected it wouldn't truly go away, not as long as Martin was with him. The car's electrical system also kept glitching, lights flickering and gauges zeroing out at random, which did not help Jon maintain a steady speed during the time ripples. He kept catching traces of that spicy-sweet odor, or one like moldy hay, though they didn't last long enough to pin down. 

Martin rest quietly in the passenger seat, as best he could. Jon tried to avoid populated areas, since they couldn't exactly avoid tracking radioactive waste out of Sellafield, but he was forced to pull over for petrol on the outskirts of Glasgow. "Do you want anything from the shop?" Jon asked, just because it seemed impolite not to.

Martin breathed deeply. "I'll stay in the car."

"Probably for the best."

When Jon got back into the car, the passenger seat was empty. He passed a hand over it, and felt a trace of lingering cold; he Knew Martin was nearby, but couldn't see any sign of him. 

He supposed he ought to be used to that by now. 

"All right, Eurydice," he muttered, and started the car. At least it ran better with Martin out of sight.

* * *

It was late when they arrived at the cabin, guided by Jon's insights rather than GPS. The location was sufficiently distant from populated areas, nothing but peat bogs and pine trees for miles in every direction, but it had electricity and an Internet connection. Jon had to smash the locks with the wheel brace, but there was no one around to notice it, and in the long run he'd done worse things with less of a reason. 

When he went back to the car, Martin had reappeared. He still needed help to get out of the car, but the shaking had lessened somewhat, and the tears had dried. "Why here?" he asked, as they mounted the front steps. 

"I thought you'd appreciate the isolation," Jon said, which made Martin huff slightly. "We both should shower, and we'll probably have to destroy these clothes."

"I don’t have any other clothes."

"I'll work something out."

Martin had looked flushed back in Sellafield, despite his cold skin. Now he appeared to have a vivid full-body sunburn, with clusters of small yellow blisters forming on his back. Jon had a similar, though less severe burn that wrapped around his neck and down his arm, where Martin had held onto him, but otherwise his face and hands were just a bit pink. He helped Martin scrub down, trying his best to be gentle and knowing it hurt anyway. 

Martin endured the treatment, only commenting absently, "I used to have fantasies about this sort of thing."

Jon swallowed hard, because he shouldn't miss something he'd never had. "Well. Sorry to disappoint."

Martin bowed his head. "Yeah."

Once they were clean and dried off, Jon steered Martin to the bedroom. "I'll get my things from the car," Jon told him. "Will you be here when I get back?"

"Maybe." Martin curled onto his side, much like Jon had found him. "It's better if I'm not."

Better for him or for Jon, he didn't clarify. His breath smelled spicy-sweet. "All right. Get some rest."

He had left his phone in the glove box with his rib, and he was relieved to find it both worked and got reception. He called Basira, who was probably wondering whether or not the Lonely had eaten him whole, and explained their situation quickly. 

_"So...it worked. They saved the world."_

"Well, from that particular scenario, at least," Jon sighed. "And none of them stuck around to save Martin, though I suppose I shouldn't actually be surprised."

_"Yeah, about that—why Scotland, exactly?"_

Jon rubbed his aching eyes. "The Extinction is still working through him, or trying to. Bursts of ionizing radiation, chemical weapons ... The Lonely is keeping him alive, and the Eye protects me, but anyone else who gets too close — any human — it's safer to keep our distance."

_"And how long is that going to last?" she asked._

"Just until I come up with a plan," Jon said. "I need you to send me some things…"

* * *

For the next few weeks they lived like Cupid and Psyche in their stolen cabin. Jon went to the nearest village for necessities — clothes, groceries, toiletries — and Basira sent books and statements in the post. He slept on the couch, when he slept at all. Mostly he immersed himself in research, or bothering Basira via text message.

Meanwhile Martin vanished from Jon's perceptions for hours at a time, even days. When he did appear, he was quiet and distant, and moved like his body was an over-full cup he mustn't spill. His burnt skin peeled and sloughed grotesquely, but healed well; his hair fell out in clumps, and grew back white.

Jon tried not to fret during the absences, because it was safer, and (he hoped) less painful for him to step away from the world. He tortured himself with little debates— _Is he just manifesting for my sake? No, of course not, he doesn't care enough for that, not anymore._ He kept the car keys in his pocket, because surely Martin wouldn't try to leave on foot, and told himself it was paranoid to think that Martin would leave at all. 

And if that constant, aching worry was related to Martin's speedy recovery … well, it didn't give Jon a great deal of incentive to stop. 

Martin appeared in the arm chair in the main room while Jon read a statement one grey afternoon; not one pertaining to anchors or Extinction, just something to keep his own god fed. Jon didn't noticed until he closed the folder, and Martin quietly asked him, "Why are you still here?"

Jon set the statement aside and quickly shut his laptop, in case of electrical problems. "I'm working on something."

"Be easier to work from the Institute, wouldn't it?"

"It pertains to … your situation. Bindings and such."

Martin drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. His nails had cracked and yellowed, but the crescent of new growth at the bottom looked healthy. "I'm not safe to be around." (The turf around the cottage was yellowing, and the ivy that had been climbing one wall was now quite dead.) 

(There were three people in the village with statements worth taking and Jon knew exactly where they were.) "Neither am I." 

Martin had always been perceptive, in ways Jon never appreciated until it was too late. "You can't undo this," he said quietly, and carefully rose to his feet. "And it wouldn't help you if you did."

"I've done a lot of impossible things," Jon countered stiffly.

Martin shook his head, and shuffled back into the bedroom.

* * *

He hit dead ends, of course. No amount of nagging Basira or swearing at Google could make information appear _ex nihilo_ , and the Eye offered up nothing but horrible trivia, no actionable knowledge. 

_Your rental car has been reported stolen,_ Basira told him in a flurry of text messages. _Diana's been made the new director and she offered me your job. Which I've been doing anyway since you ran off without me. Again._

Jon drove around the village, having removed the passenger seat with power tools, and thought about taking a statement. Maybe all of them. 

Instead he went back to the cabin and made his own circle out of books and statements. If he wanted to consult an oracle, he might as well choose the only person who'd ever seemed to have all the answers.

In a jail cell at HMP Belmarsh, the inmate known as Elias Bouchard began to smile. 

_—So you've finally decided to stop harassing our poor Detective, have you?_

_—You know how these bindings work,_ Jon thought. _You're bound to the Institute, and the staff are bound to you. You let Gertrude be bound to Agnes back when you were James Wright._

_—Well done, Archivist. Do you mean to ask a question amidst all that?_

_—Can I destroy the Extinction without killing Martin?_

There was still something immensely satisfying about being able to shock him. _—Of course you can. Simply reverse climate change, end war, and prevent the Singularity, and you'll just about have it sorted._

_—Why did Peter even use a binding? We chase each other around the world, thwarting rituals one at a time. Why is the Extinction so much greater a threat?_

_—Because it feeds on all the others._ Elias offered Jon images of Gertrude's disrupted rituals as backdrop. _It's the monster even monsters fear. The World Without_ any _of Us. Even if one of the rituals succeeded, it would necessarily bring the Extinction along with any other god. What else would inspire the cooperation of so many different factions?_

That sounded right. That didn't sound right at all. _—So what makes the Watcher's Crown an exception? Or were you just counting on Martin to keep his hand in Fenrir's mouth forever?_

Elias's pleasure slimed across Jon's mind. _—Why do you think we began with a prison, Jon? Though the Flesh went and spoiled the symmetry of it. I suppose we can thank the newcomer for restoring that, at least._

Of course. The Ceaseless Watcher had always glutted itself on the work of the other fourteen; why wouldn't its ritual enable the same? Unleash them all at once and then sit back to enjoy the horrorshow. _The feeling that something, somewhere, is letting you suffer, just so it can watch_ …

_—How do we know it would work? How do we know these things can be controlled? Any of them?_

_—You've touched them all, Archivist. You know, intimately, every shade and hue of fear, from your first Leitner to your recent excursion into Sellafield. You're the first man in a hundred and fifty years to have earned the right to wear the Watcher's Crown and command that which has marked you. So … you tell me._

Jon opened his eyes and was back in his head. He tidied up his improvised circle, and lay down on the couch, but did not sleep. 

* * *

Days passed before he saw Martin again, and he fought the urge to seek him out. That could only end poorly: perhaps he'd find Martin had truly gone, perhaps he'd be caught in the Lonely again, or he would overpower it but lose whatever was left of Martin's trust. 

(He dreamed, sometimes, of endless corridors, or a dark room with silver worms oozing in through every crack; but those dreams were fog-haunted, indistinct, and he never saw Martin in them.)

He had fallen into the habit of fixing two mugs of tea at a time, two plates of food: Martin rarely ate with him, but the food disappeared, and Jon willfully avoided looking too closely at the bins. He had just finished adding milk to his own tea when Martin's voice came from behind him: "You're really bad at this, you know."

Jon turned; Martin was holding his mug and making a face at it. "Sorry," he said, feeling weirdly stung. "You're welcome to make your own, you know."

"I know," Martin said, and kept drinking the tea anyway. 

Jon sat down opposite him and tried not to stare. Well, not stare too openly, at least. Even the hair that hadn't fallen out was showing white roots now, and he'd lost weight, though he was still taller than Jon and broader. The mug in his hand was no longer steaming, though Jon had only just poured it. 

"Ask me," Martin said, peering back at Jon over the edge of his mug. 

"Ask you what?"

"Whatever you're fretting about." Martin put the mug aside. "I can hear your thinking from over here, so just come out with it."

Fine. Jon set down his own tea and thought about how to phrase this question. "Why did you choose the Lonely?" _Why not the Eye,_ he left unsaid.

Martin huffed at that. "You have to ask?"

"I want to hear you say it."

"Okay. Sure." Martin glanced out the window, which was covered in dead ivy. "I never made friends in London, not really. Just people I knew from work, and I couldn't really talk to any of them without giving away my real age and everything. You and Tim and Sasha were the closest thing I had, and you all died."

 _I came back,_ Jon wanted to protest, _I came back for you, all of you,_ but that wasn't strictly true. Besides, they'd already had that conversation. 

"I lost everyone, and nobody particularly missed me when I went to work for Peter," Martin continued. "So if I was going to do this — balance the Extinction, or anchor it, or whatever — it made sense to pick the thing that would let me keep myself separate from the world as much as possible. Give me some control over the thing I was anchoring. It's not like I had anything left to lose, anyway."

Jon couldn't quite repress himself. "I missed you."

"No," Martin said, not with any particular gentleness. "You missed the idea of me, Jon. You missed the way I made you feel, but you didn't miss me. I loved the idea of you, but we barely knew each other, even before you came back a monster."

"That isn't true—"

"Don't _lie_ to me," Martin said, a flash of real anger on his face. "And don't lie to yourself."

"Were you lying," Jon asked, "in the letter you left me?"

Martin disappeared, which was a terribly convenient way to get out of an argument. He took his tea with him, and Jon found the empty mug hours later, rinsed out on the draining board. 

* * *

Jon had seen through the Stranger and climbed out of the Buried. He'd looked into the Dark and even touched the Extinction, with the scar to prove it running across his neck and down his arm.

He could take this burden from Martin, and all it would cost was the world. He could be rid of his doubts and his fears and his pain, and all it would take was a crown.

He was lucky Basira was still taking his calls at this point. _"What is it? What's happened?"_

Jon licked his lips. "What would you do to get Daisy back?" he asked. "What would you give?"

He couldn't compel answers over the phone, but he believed her when she answered, _"Anything."_

Jon nodded at the vacant room. "I'm going to need some help …"

* * *

He left Martin a note, and his credit card, in case this didn't work out. _The owners of the cabin won't be back until April,_ he explained, _and there's a bus from the village that goes to Inverness._

He hesitated, and added, _it wasn't a lie._

The trip back to Sellafield went faster with both time and the car working properly. Jon supposed he should appreciate that while it lasted. There was no convenient Isolation to dispel the security this time, but the guard at the main entrance had once crossed the Slaughter, and Jon ensured he was too busy sobbing into his hands to report a trespasser. 

The building with the circle was now plastered with warning signs banning anyone entrance, but the wheel brace was still very useful for smashing locks. 

Jon opened the rucksack in which he'd packed his supplies. There were fifteen pylons in the circle; Basira had misappropriated Institute funds to purchase fifteen digital cameras, which he secured to the top of each pylon with zip ties. She'd also sent nazars, dozens of them, in different sizes, and Jon systematically cracked each one before hanging it from the razor wire. 

The air inside the circle was still hot and close, and the haze of chlorine gas was thick enough to give everything a greenish tinge. Jon took his rib in one hand, and a jar of paint in the other — lead white, naturally. It wasn't an ideal writing method, especially given his tenuous grasp of Sanskrit, but he managed to space the words more or less evenly around the circle: _I am Time, the shatterer of worlds…. Already they are slain; you will merely be my instrument._

Inscription accomplished, he set the paint and the rib aside and turned to the pillar nearest to him. A plastic bottle full of used motor oil had been hung on it with twine. He fumbled the cap off this, held his breath, and put it to his lips. 

Getting down a small mouthful took nearly all the willpower he had, but when he was sure he wouldn't vomit it right back up, he moved on to the next pillar. 

He drank down mud mixed with glyphosate. Blood. Sea water, probably acidified. The next pillar didn't have any convenient liquids, but there was a dead bird pinned to it, now heavily decayed. He pulled out a piece of unidentifiable meat and choked it down whole. 

Christ, he hoped five was enough. Just one pomegranate seed had been enough for Persephone, after all. 

Before his stomach could revolt against him, Jon undressed, and wrapped his clothes in a plastic bag. The water in the storage pool was the color of milk, and the scum had died off, probably from the chlorine. He knew what that water would do to exposed skin, but presuming this didn't kill him — and that was a terrifying real possibility — he would like some uncontaminated clothing to put on afterwards. 

He clutched the rib in one hand, and jumped in.

The water was blood-warm and burned like acid — probably was acid, if low concentration. Actually opening his eyes was out of the question, so it was fortunate he didn't need to. He dove straight down, towards the array of casks that lined the bottom of the pool, cracked and pitted relics from the seventies. Warped, splintered fuel rods spilled out of some of them, the reason for the filthy water; others were still nominally intact but so corroded they seemed liable to dissolve at a touch.

On top of one such cask, a bloodstained altar cloth had been spread. Arranged on it were an iron sickle, a bronze sword, a set of leaden scales … and an ornate silver crown, already badly tarnished by the polluted water. It was set with star sapphires, and outside the murky water they would have blazed like so many slitted eyes. It would have been beautiful.

But what drew Jon's attention was the object in the center, a lump of meat the size of his fist that still twitched and spasmed despite the acid water, despite the radiation, despite the weeks spent separated from its owner. 

He swam down to the altar, and picked it up. A beating human heart. It fit neatly in his hand. 

Jon raised his rib in his other hand, matched its tip to the superior vena cava, and pushed it in. It took some effort to push it all the way through, past the valve and through the muscles.

In his own chest, for a moment, his heart stopped. 

* * *

In a cell in Belmarsh, the man once known as Jonah Magnus began to scream in impotent rage.

* * *

For a moment, he only knew pain. He was burning alive; he was cut to ribbons; he was starving; he was devoured. He saw a thousand dooms as if he'd lived them, all at once, and the broken, twisted things that would rise after them.

He Beheld the World-Without-Us, and it flinched first.

Then something cold settled in his chest: a spreading chill, like frost blossoming on glass. Under other circumstances it might've hurt, but just then it was a balm, a barrier between him and the horrors he'd invited in. He savored the relief it offered, and sank gratefully into a haze of absence.

Touch pulled him back to consciousness: an arm around his chest, hands on his biceps as he was pulled from the water. He coughed up blood and water, and the hands rolled him onto his side and rubbed a soothing line up his back. He knew those hands, and on instinct pressed against them, against the body behind him. 

"You're such an idiot," a voice said, but it sounded more exasperated than angry.

Now it was his turn to be half-carried, half-lead away from the pool. Not outside, though — just to a decontamination shower he hadn't noticed on his first visit. Foolish of him not to realize there would be one on site. The water gushed over him, cold and clean, and the shock of it helped root him back in his body. He turned his face into the spray, let it get in his mouth and nose and eyes, let it rinse away the blood and poison. There would be plenty of both later on. 

When Jon blinked the water from his eyes, he found Martin sitting next to him on the floor of the shower, his face a thundercloud. "How'd you get here," he croaked, without the strength for a compulsion.

"I was hiding in the back of the car the whole time," Martin snapped. He asked, "What the hell did you _do,"_ but he looked—

No, he knew the answer. Jon knew that he knew. Just like he knew that the heart he'd left on the submerged altar was now beating in time with his own.

"I wanted to help," Jon said. "To share the burden. I can't — I won't trade the world for one person. Not even you. But the Eye contains what it beholds, robs it of some of its power. And I can give up myself."

Martin huffed softly at that. "You're delirious."

"Probably," Jon agreed. 

Martin pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a minute. "It's like I swallowed the sun," he said into them. "You think I'd be used to being watched by now, but it's — you're so _bright."_

"Is it better that before, though?" Jon asked, though he already knew the answer. 

"...yeah." Martin looked up. "But you're stuck with it now, too. And stuck with me."

"I hardly mind," Jon said, and he knew that Martin knew he wasn't lying.

They dried off; Martin had to help Jon dress, and the burns were going to be _hideous._ Jon limped outside, all the guards and workers once again conveniently absent, and laid down across the back seat of the car. 

"We should go back—" Jon started to say.

"I know," Martin said, and ran a hand through Jon's hair. Perhaps he was just imagining that he seemed marginally warmer. "I know."

The car lurched into motion, and Jon fell asleep.

* * *

His dreams are different, now. 

He doesn't haunt other people's nightmares anymore. Instead he watches the world end, over and over, every night a new apocalypse or three. It's no better for his nerves, objectively speaking, but the Archivist in him is _fascinated._

It's not enough to sate his patron, but it takes some of the edge off. It helps. 

Jon feels like a ghost at the Institute these days: he's alone in the archives, since Basira left to find whatever peace was left for her. People have a tendency to overlook him, now, if he doesn't draw attention to himself, but it doesn't particularly bother him. He has statements. He has little projects to occupy his time. 

He has an empty bed, and a table set for one. It's safer that way, if he's going to stay in London. Keeps the disasters in his nightmares instead of his neighborhood.

He doesn't like it, but he also has another patron to mind, so he endures.

He travels a lot more than he used to, though. One weekend a month, at most, but it's enough. Land's End, John O'Groats, the Hebrides: as far as the Azores, once, which at least had better weather. Anything to keep away from population centers. Anything to make it safe.

Jon checks into the hotel, the bed and breakfast, the rented cabin. He unpacks his carry-on and takes off his shoes. One hours passes, two hours, three: he plugs in his phone charger, dares to open his laptop. Sometimes he falls asleep. 

He's never startled, though, when a hand finally finds his neck, his shoulder, the curve of his spine. He will always feel it coming, like an ache between his ribs.

Jon turns to meet Martin's wry smile. He does something for Solus Shipping now, nominally, which is the least Lukas could do for him; his hair is getting long again, curling luminous white around his ears. He tells Jon about his travels, when they see each other, and sometimes there's an echo of a heartbeat in his chest.

It's enough. It's all they're going to get. 

"Miss me?" Martin asks.

"Always," Jon says, and pulls him close.


End file.
